An artist whose work has appeared in local museums, Toledo had long been considered part of the Breakaway Generation in Mexican art

Francisco Toledo, a surrealist once described as Mexico's greatest living artist, whose first U.S. exhibition occurred in Fort Worth, died Sept. 5. He was 79.

Dianne Solis of The Dallas Morning News profiled Toledo in 2003. At the time, he lived in Oaxaca, where he earned an international reputation for a rich body of work whose overarching themes were expressed in paintings and engravings of mythical animals and insects.

In its 2003 profile of Mr. Toledo, The News quoted Santa Barraza, a Texas artist, as saying that Oaxaca is known as a nurturing ground for artists — a role it played dramatically in the case of Toledo.

"In Mexico, if you are an artist, they call you a master, a maestro," Barraza told The News. "In the U.S., if you are an artist, they say, 'Get a real job.' "

It soon became obvious that, in Oaxaca, Toledo was the region's top maestro. As The News noted, Toledo was behind the restoration of many of Oaxaca's colonial buildings, converting them into cultural centers. Among them are the Santa Domingo Church and the conversion of its adjacent convent into a museum.

For years, Oaxaca inspired his passion, his commitment to activism. Its historic Spanish-colonial center was decaying before the artist made a commitment of time and money to its cultural institutions, including the Oaxaca Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca, a library for the blind, a photographic arts center and a botanical garden.

An undated portrait of Francisco Toledo(Arturo Fuentes)

He also became a champion of the anti-gentrification effort, going after proposed real estate developments that he believed would have sullied forever the city's historic core.

His death did not go unnoticed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, who announced it on Twitter, calling Toledo "a true defender of nature, customs and traditions of our people." No other details were given.

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Toledo had long been considered part of the Breakaway Generation in Mexican art. In a career that spanned seven decades, he studied art in Paris, where he met Octavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo.

Oaxaca was also the birthplace of Tamayo, whose works have fetched more than $1 million at New York auction houses.

This handout file photo taken on May 16, 2017 and released on August 3, 2017 by the artist's press office shows artist Francisco Toledo posing for a picture at a cafe in Oaxaca, Mexico.(JALIL OLMEDO / Getty Images)

Locally, Toledo's work has been shown at The Fort Worth Art Museum— which in 1987 became the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth — and the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University.

Toledo traced his lineage to the Zapotecs, who flourished before the 16th-century Spanish conquests in what is now the southern state of Oaxaca, which inspired many of his paintings, drawings, prints, collages, tapestries and ceramics.

His images were scorpions, grasshoppers and alligators, monkeys and tapirs, all of which he encountered in his childhood and which he viewed as symbols and metaphors, which as The Times noted, alluded "to everything from sex and fertility to a dying natural landscape."

"Toledo's is the art of shamanism," Christopher Goodwin of The Guardian wrote in 2000, "in which people are transformed into beasts and animals may take on human characteristics."

The writer Paul Theroux once called Toledo "El Maestro," which he said was "an appropriate description: the master, also teacher and authority figure. His work, and the results of his campaigns and his philanthropy, can be seen everywhere."

Despite his fame in artistic circles, he was not one to court celebrity.

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"The man himself is elusive," Theroux said. "He hides from journalists, he hates to be photographed, he seldom gives interviews, he no longer attends his own openings, but instead sends his wife and daughter to preside over them, while he stays in his studio, unwilling to speak — a great example of how writers and artists should respond — letting his work speak for him, with greater eloquence."